Pornography: A monstrous evil

Prof. (Dr.) Dharmakanta Kumbhakar

(drkdharmakanta1@gmail.com) 

Just a few decades ago, pornography was something that was,  for most people, hard to come by. Even for someone growing up in a city like Guwahati in the 1980s and 1990s, pornography was still a faraway thing.

There were a few book shops at Panbazar where a very few so-called adult magazines were available, but those were bought only by the adults. For most people, pornography was the dark side of society and was rarely talked about. Over the last few decades, our society has changed significantly due to globalisation. The most striking change is the sexualization of our society. Today, the sexualization of our society has brought in pornography everywhere. We live in a society that is almost completely awash in pornography. Most of the bookshops are full of such magazines. Telephone-based pornography is available nowadays. We don’t have to go out to find porn videos and images. It comes to us, to our home, with complete privacy. Porn websites are free on the internet. Porn stories are available on the web. Anyone and everyone can access online porn videos and images on their computers, laptops, and smart phones from anywhere. Even children and women enjoy porn nowadays almost as much as adult men do.

Pornography is a problem that is causing immense harm to our society. It’s a cancer in our society. Like cancer, pornography doesn’t kill quickly, but eventually it will kill us. It’s ruining a major section of society. The victims of pornography are everywhere. Women and children are most affected by it. Today, women are objectified as never before. Pornography is training men and women to use each other rather than love each other. It’s divorcing sex from love, relationships, and self-sacrificial service.

And it is addictive. Pornography addiction is ruining families, harming children, increasing prostitution, and spreading sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS, in society. It’s also linked with increasing incidences of sexual harassment, on-the-job sexual harassment, sexual assaults and rape, sexual exploitation of children, sexual homicides, sexual trafficking, and violent sex crimes in the present society. Pornography addiction also increases the number of sex offenders in society. This behaviour frequently grows into a sexual addiction, which the victims fail to dissociate from. No matter what the negative consequences are, the victims are finding it difficult to stay away from them.

Pornography addiction causes immense harm to families in numerous ways. It can destroy a family by ruining marriage. It is usually men who become addicted to pornography. A porn-addicted husband may lose sexual interest in his wife; he may act out his perverse or violent porn-fueled fantasies with his spouse; or he may choose instead to act out with prostitutes. This may spread sexually transmitted diseases to the family. He may also spend thousands of rupees feeding his addiction. Sometimes the wife may also get addicted to pornography. She may lose sexual interest in her husband. Such conditions can destroy a marriage.

Even if the addiction doesn’t destroy a marriage, it can cause the innocent spouse great pain. Children are also harmed when addiction to pornography ruins their parents’ marriages. Child sexual abuse becomes a concern when adults’ interest in pornography includes teens, incest, or child pornography. Pornography addiction destroys the sexual lives of young men and women. There are about as many of today’s youth and young adults who watch porn videos on a regular basis. Pornographic videos have become so easily available these days. There is evidence that many young men and women would prefer to masturbate in front of computers or smart phones rather than spend time with a young woman or man. This will have a deleterious effect on their ability to make a marriage work and even their willingness to enter into a marriage.

The children may see such videos and images when the parents watch them, or they may find them on their parents’ computers, laptops, or smart phones. And with the advent of the internet, children are being exposed to online porn videos and images at an earlier age and to more extreme content. Most exposure begins when children are 13 to 18 years old. This early exposure to pornography can lead to an addiction that twists and deforms a child’s normal development, destroying their innocence. Apart from sexual addiction, children are also harmed when they receive a misplaced sex education from viewing pornography, which depicts promiscuous, perverse, degrading, and violent sexual behaviours. They grow up with a distorted and evil understanding of sex. Female children can get the wrong ideas from pornography. Children are harmed when they are sexually abused by other children or adults who imitate the behaviour that they have seen in child pornography. They are also harmed when they are deceived by pornography into thinking that it is correct to send photos or videos to others, that they have taken of themselves while being nude or partially nude, or while engaging in sexual conduct. Children are harmed when their addiction to pornography follows them into adulthood and prevents or ruins their marriages, costs them their job, or contributes to making them sex offenders.

Pornography is one of the greatest evils to ever afflict a society. Without a doubt, porn is killing us. What can be done about it? We need to fight against pornography. We need to acknowledge its pervasiveness in our society. Studies have shown that if people can be kept away from pornography until they are fully developed, say, in their mid-20s, their likelihood of ever using it is immensely reduced.  The rate of addiction among those who are not exposed to pornography as children is very low. Parents must take the necessary steps to keep their kids away from pornography. The government must take the necessary steps to maintain a decent society, as citizens have every right to live and raise their children in an environment free from evils like pornography. Reducing the supply through strict enforcement of obscenity laws will help reduce addiction to pornography.

The enforcement of obscenity laws will also send the message that pornography is a moral evil. In particular, children and young adults need to hear that message.

Moreover, there is a need for professional counselling to help deal with pornography addiction. We need all the help that we can get to deal with this major social problem.